U.S. Poet Laureate is a California Poet Laureate

Juan Felipe Herrera

(Fowler/Fresno/Riverside)

2012-2014 California State Poet Laureate

Appointed March 2012 by Governor Jerry Brown.*

Juan Felipe Herrera was born in Fowler, California, on December 27, 1948. The son of migrant farmers, Herrera moved often, living in trailers or tents along the roads of the San Joaquin Valley in Southern California. As a child, he attended school in a variety of small towns from San Francisco to San Diego. He began drawing cartoons while in middle school, and by high school was playing folk music by Bob Dylan and Woody Guthrie.

Herrera graduated from San Diego High in 1967, and was one of the first wave of Chicanos to receive an Educational Opportunity Program (EOP) scholarship to attend UCLA. There, he became immersed in the Chicano Civil Rights Movement, and began performing in experimental theater, influenced by Allen Ginsberg and Luis Valdez.

In 1972, Herrera received a BA in Social Anthropology from UCLA. He received a masters in Social Anthropology from Stanford in 1980, and went on to earn an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1990.

His interests in indigenous cultures inspired him to lead a formal Chicano trek to Mexican Indian villages, from the rain forest of Chiapas to the mountains of Nayarit. The experience greatly changed him as an artist. His work, which includes video, photography, theater, poetry, prose, and performance, has made Herrera a leading voice on the Mexican American and indigenous experience.

Herrera is the author of many collections of poetry, including Senegal Taxi (University of Arizona Press, 2013); Half of the World in Light: New and Selected Poems (University of Arizona Press, 2008), a recipient of the PEN/Beyond Margins Award F187 Reasons Mexicanos Can’t Cross The Border: Undocuments 1971–2007 (City Lights, 2007); and Crashboomlove (University of New Mexico Press, 1999), a novel in verse, which received the Americas Award.

His books of prose for children include: SkateFate (Rayo, 2011) Calling The Doves (Children’s Book, 2001); Upside Down Boy (2006), which was adapted into a musical in New York City; and Cinnamon Girl: Letters Found Inside a Cereal Box (HarperCollins, 2005), which tells the tragedy of 9/11 through the eyes of a young Puerto Rican girl.

Ilan Stavans, the Mexican American essayist, has said: “There is one constant over the past three decades in Chicano literature and his name is Juan Felipe Herrera. Aesthetically, he leaps over so many canons that he winds up on the outer limits of urban song. And spiritually, he is deep into the quest that we all must begin before it is too late.”

In a profile of Herrera in The New York Times, Stephen Burt wrote: “Many poets since the 1960s have dreamed of a new hybrid art, part oral, part written, part English, part something else: an art grounded in ethnic identity, fueled by collective pride, yet irreducibly individual too. Many poets have tried to create such an art: Herrera is one of the first to succeed.”

Herrera has received fellowships and grants from the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference, the California Arts Council, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Stanford Chicano Fellows Program, and the University of California at Berkeley.

Over the past three decades, he has founded a number of performance ensembles, and has taught poetry, art, and performance in community art galleries and correctional facilities. He has taught at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop and served as chair of the Chicano and Latin American Studies Department at CSU-Fresno.

Herrera currently holds the Tomás Rivera Endowed Chair in the Creative Writing Department at UC Riverside. He is also director of the Art and Barbara Culver Center for the Arts, a new multimedia space in downtown Riverside, California. He was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2011.

He is the father of five children, and lives in Fresno, California, with his partner, the poet and performance artist, Margarita Robles.

California Poet Laureate

In 2001, Governor Gray Davis created the official position of California State Poet Laureate. Each poet laureate for the State of California is appointed by California's governor (and confirmed by the state Senate) and serves for a term of two years. The California State Poet Laureate Program is run by the California Arts Council.

Although the program was officially established under Governor Davis, there were occasional poets laureate who served the state as a kind of poetry ambassador, including the very first poet laureate ever in the nation, Oakland librarian and poet Ina Coolbrith. Below are those who have received this honor.